March Madness? The Other Crazy Things Employees Are Betting On

By Eric B. Meyer

Got a busted bracket in your HR Department’s NCAA Men’s Tournament bracket pool?

Well, according to this CareerBuilder.com survey, 1 in 7 U.S. workers planned to fill out a bracket in an NCAA Men’s Basketball Tournament office pool. Most likely to participate would be the folks in IT (40 percent), with senior management 50 percent more likely to participate than entry-level employees.

Betting on who will be the next Pope?

But if you want to get with the big ballers, the shot callers, brackets on fleek, you need to raise your game. According to the CareerBuilder.com survey, here are the most unusual pools reported:

Employees bet on who would become the next Pope of the Roman Catholic Church.
Employees predicted when a colleague’s current relationship would end.
Employees made (and played) Bingo cards of common complaints made by a co-worker.
Employees guessed the number of protein coding genes in the human genome.
Employees bet on who would hook-up with whom at the company holiday party.
Employees predicted the weekly eliminations on The Bachelor reality TV competition.
Employees predicted the next co-worker who would quit.

You know, that fourth one may be from the most boring office ever. Maybe they should merge offices with No. 5 on the list.

This was originally published on Eric B. Meyer’s blog, The Employer Handbook.